Congress: Hey People, Thank You For Being Stupid

     Once again, our politicians are proving that they think we are stupid.  With the congressional hearings on Goldman Sachs role in the economic meltdown, our elected officials are banking on their belief that we are, as they perceive us, stupid.  They want us to believe that the entire global meltdown was the fault of Wall Street in general, and Goldman Sachs in particular.
     Congress, by focusing on further demonizing institutions that they have already vilified for *gasp* making money, hopes to annoint a scapegoat for the world's economic mess while deflecting blame from themselves.  They hope to lay a cause for the meltdown for history on a symptom instead of the cause and thus maintain their all important legacies. Goldman, having made their windfall and certain to benefit even more from any future "regulation", and looking at most a mild slap on the wrist as punishment is showing itself to be quite the resigned sacrificial offering.
     Our elected officials caused the global meltdown.  Not the ones in Europe or the far east, but American politicians.  They with their towering economic intellects, contrived and then crafted the perverse model that European politicians copied that led to the debt - the unperforming debt - that caused the global economy to collapse.  Debt that continues to grow, by the way, at an astronomical pace and for which an illusion was created to dupe everyone into believing is under control.  That illusion will fade, but no-one knows when. Here’s a nice synopsis of our debt condition - http://tinyurl.com/2ct5pym.
     Was Wall Street innocent in the unfolding of the events that led to the collapse?  Was Goldman Sachs? 
     Not by any stretch of the imagination.  Wall Street and the players who made out like (pardon the pun) bandits in the economic disaster of 2008 merely fanned the flames of the collapse by taking advantage of what for them was a once in a lifetime business advantage that they were fortunate to see arising and those like Lehman and WaMu didn't.  What they did that fueled the fire was almost certainly the most selfish and worst example of collective greed run amok, but was also probably not illegal and in the end they can claim, and rightly so, that they were only servicing the interests of their shareholders.
    Our elected officials think we are stupid.  And when they see polls that show that the people want them to punish Wall Street, they smile inwardly knowing they have dodged the bullet that they themselves inadvertently tried to shoot themselves with and once again, they are proved right. 
     The people who elected them are stupid. 

Yom HaShoah

I posted this as a comment on a blog I enjoy reading - Boker Tov Boulder - in regards to a post she had on her site about 2010 Holocaust Remembrance Day.  I said:

You sound frightened. Yeah... me too. Not for me, but for my children. I’m frightened for the children of other Jews and for Israel and the children there, and for other Jews.


In my weak mind, Jews have been the target of murderers for a lot of reasons, but one main one has been that when it became inconvenient to be constrained, or at the very least restrained by standards of conduct and morality, there stood the Jews, a human signpost placed by G-d to warn against straying from the road to humanity when all other roads lead to freedom from restraint and immorality and eventually inhumanity.

Another reason was that when certain people needed something, normally someone to blame, there were the Jews - always a minority and nearly always without a fallback position. Convenient.

And that is the state that we find ourselves again – a minority, with not our interests, but the importance of our existence it sometimes seems, being weighed against things like the interests of Islam, or Europe or even the U.S.

If I were but fortunate to know the mind of G-d, but in my mind (weak mind remember) it is such an irony to me that possibly the main reason that humanity still exists at all is what so much of humanity wants to see destroyed and that we find ourselves today, so soon it seems after haShoah contemplating whether or not it is possible again in our day.

But we have a fallback position. Israel. And they want to take it from us. And it is heart breaking that so many of us don’t seem to care all that much.